Max Boot

Max Boot (born September 12, 1969) is an American author, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Since then, he has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has also written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has authored books on military history. 

In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party," in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The boot was born in Moscow. His parents and grandmother, all Russian Jews, fled from the Soviet Union in 1976 as refugees and moved to Los Angeles, where he was raised and eventually gained naturalized U.S. citizenship.

Boot attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1991 and Yale University with an MA in Diplomatic History in 1992. He began his career in journalism, writing columns for the Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian. He later claimed that he believed he was the only conservative writer in that paper's history. As of 2005, Boot and his family lived in the New York area.

The boot has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He has blogged regularly for Commentary since 2007 and on its blog page called Contentions for several years. He has given lectures at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College.

Boot worked as a writer and as an editor for The Christian Science Monitor from 1992 to 1994. He moved to The Wall Street Journal for the next eight years. After writing an investigative column about legal issues called "Rule of Law" for four years, he was promoted to editor of the op-ed page. Boot left the Journal in 2002 to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies. 

His initial writings with the CFR appeared in several publications, including The New York Post, The Times, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. Boot wrote Savage Wars of Peace, a study of small wars in American history, with Basic Books in 2002. The title came from Kipling's poem "White Man's Burden." James A. Russell in the Journal of Cold War Studies, James A. Russell criticized the book, saying, "Boot did none of the critical research, and thus the inferences he draws from his uncritical rendition of history are essentially meaningless." 

Benjamin Schwarz argued in The New York Times that Boot asked the U.S. military to do a "nearly impossible task" and criticized the book as "unrevealing." Victor Davis Hanson in History News Network gave a positive review, saying, "Boot's well-written narrative is not only fascinating reading but didactic as well." Robert M. Cassidy in Military Review labeled it "extraordinary." Boot's book also won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best non-fiction book recently published pertaining to Marine Corps history.

Boot wrote once again for the CFR in 2003 and 2004. The World Affairs Council of America named Boot one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy" in 2004. He also worked as a Project for the New American Century (PNAC) member in 2004. Boot published the work War Made New, an analysis of revolutions in military technology since 1500, in 2006. 

The book's central thesis is that a military succeeds when it has dynamic, forward-looking structures and administration in place to exploit new technologies. It concludes that the U.S. military may lose its edge if it does not become flatter, less bureaucratic, and more decentralized. The book received praise from Josiah Bunting III in The New York Times, who called it "unusual and magisterial," and criticism from Martin Sieff in The American Conservative, who called it "remarkably superficial."

Boot wrote many more articles with the CFR in 2007, and he received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism that year. In an April 2007 episode of Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, Boot stated that he "used to be a journalist" and that he currently views himself purely as a military historian. Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain in his 2008 United States presidential election bid. 

In an editorial in World Affairs Journal, he stated that he saw strong parallels between Theodore Roosevelt and McCain. Boot continued to write for the CFR in several publications in 2008 and 2009.